PREPARED

Description

Spain is increasingly exposed to interconnected environmental, health, humanitarian, and geopolitical challenges, including floods, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, heat waves, pandemics, and large-scale migration emergencies. Yet despite growing policy attention to resilience, little is known about how prepared citizens are to cope with such events and how social networks shape their capacity to respond. Existing assessments focus primarily on individuals’ material resources and risk perceptions, overlooking the role of social networks and community capacities in generating resilience. The PREPARED project addresses this gap by examining how individual resources, social networks, and collective efficacy jointly influence preparedness for disasters in Spain.

The project is grounded in the concept of social resilience, understood as the capacity of individuals and communities to anticipate, cope with, and adapt to adverse events. It argues that preparedness is not only a matter of household resources and skills, but also of access to social support, social capital, and community-based forms of cooperation. Social networks can provide critical resources during crises, facilitate access to information and assistance, and enhance collective action, yet they can also reproduce inequalities in vulnerability and recovery.

To generate the first comprehensive assessment of preparedness that incorporates social networks in Spain, PREPARED will develop and validate innovative survey instruments and administer a nationally representative survey of approximately 3,500 adults. The survey will measure preparedness for different hazards, previous disaster experiences, risk perceptions, vulnerabilities, trust in institutions, neighbourhood collective efficacy, volunteering, and both core and broader acquaintanceship networks. Novel aggregated relational data techniques will be used to estimate the size, resourcefulness, and vulnerability of respondents’ personal networks.

The project will identify regional and social inequalities in preparedness, develop a typology combining individual and network resources, and assess how preparedness relates to trust, vulnerability, and local risk contexts. By producing open-access data and evidence-based policy recommendations, PREPARED will advance scientific understanding of social resilience while supporting more effective disaster risk reduction and preparedness strategies in Spain and beyond.

Objective

The project has the following objectives:

1. Map citizens of Spain’s preparedness for different types of potential disasters, in terms of both their material and human resources and social networks.

2. Analyse whether previous exposure to specific disasters and risk awareness predicts preparedness levels for new disasters and trust in institutions.

3. Detect regional and social inequalities in preparedness, including those based on health status, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and migration background.

4. Evaluate alignment between policy frameworks and the lived realities of the population.